I thought about scheduling some posts for when I’m gone, but nothing I want to post is completely free of controversy. :-) Since I like the discussion that’s been happening here and want to be part of it I’m just going to let it be a little quiet for a while.

————–

[0] It’s been slow recently because, as much as I love vacation, I hate going on vacation. I get incredibly busy ramping up to leave. Ugh.

Of those 1001 posts, 364 of them were auto-posted from my del.icio.us bookmarks.

There have been 994 comments so far (thank you!) though some of those are my own replies, too. There have been 127,622 spam comments (no thank you), mostly all of them caught by Akismet (thank you).

I have uploaded 95 things to the blog, whether they’re photos or something else.

This blog is #1 in Google searches for “esxcfg vswitch,” and #2 in searches for “when you do things right people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” I occasionally search for things in Google and get my own site as a result (four times). Better is when a coworker searches for something and gets my site (twice). Best is when a customer searches for something and finds my site, then sends me the URL as something I should read. Heh. It takes four minutes for posts here to appear in the Google search results.

According to FeedBurner I hit a consistent 2^9 readers, via RSS, a few weeks back (hello there!). I consistently get another 2^9 folks coming straight into the site from other sites and search engines, many from the VMTN and Planet Sysadmin aggregators. Exactly 50% of my readers use Google Reader.

So in conclusion, dear readers, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this blog so far, and it’s really because of all you folks that read it, comment on it, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’m right, tell me I’m nuts, invite me to conferences, drink beer with me, and basically make me glad I’m not just talking to myself. :-)

Recent links include:

• One of the Meerkat Manor meerkats got run over by a truck. DOH. (has spoilers)
• Russian long-exposure photos make people look like smoke. Cool.
• Getty Images has released Moodstream, which is neat for evoking thoughts. Too bad they don’t have video of IT guys stomping the crap out of computer hardware, Office Space-style.
• Google has a project called Obfuscated TCP, to defeat wiretapping. It’s pretty sad it’s coming to this. How long will we put up with the Big Brother crap before we rise up and smite our government?
• Raymond Chen has an interesting story about letting the native speaker win. I find it interesting that instead of being pleased that someone has bothered to learn their language, the Japanese basically try to prove you suck at it. Whatever.
• Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo!. Good for him, bad for Yahoo!, but Yahoo has no idea what it’s doing anymore.
• Metallica is a bunch of chodes. Again.
• In honor of Metallica being stupid, again, we should all watch the original Napster Bad video.

There. Excitement, through and through. Now get back to work (mainly talking to myself).

I’ve always liked the concept of the Creative Commons license, so I’ve chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and I put up a Terms of Use page with all the information, including attribution information.

I am always thrilled to see people doing stuff with my work, because it means I’m writing things that are useful to people, and writing in a way people seem to like. So thank you! And thanks again to all you readers out there. More and more every day, which is really cool. :-)

First of all I have to say thanks for another great year. I really enjoy writing here, and you folks have been great to me, encouraging me, and generally making me believe that I’m not just writing for myself. Not that I’d stop, of course, but it’s nice when someone is listening. :-) So thank you!

I’m off for the holidays. As with most vacations for me the lead-up to them is terrible, with the nailing down of loose ends being the key time sink. I’ve also had a couple of big presentations & proposals to make, so I haven’t been as attentive as I should be to my email. I know a few of you have emailed me, I’ll catch you sometime after Christmas.

So whatever holidays you’re in to, whether it’s Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, that old standby Christmas, or something else, please have fun and be safe.

…Bob

The nice thing about sitting in the woods waiting for animals to show up is a lot of time to think. Once I’m through with the 1000 messages in my INBOX and voice mail[1] I have a whole bunch of new stuff to write about. It is sort of strange to think about computers when you’re in the middle of a national forest, but nature has long been a muse for artists, philosophers, and soldiers. Why can’t it do the same for an IT guy? :-)

[0] Don’t worry, they’re safe with me around.

[1] A lot of it is automated mail, but despite that if you emailed me or called me I’ll get back to you in the next three days.

I can usually tell when something like this happens, because my per-day comment spam totals jump. Akismet rules.

If you are thinking about buying a copy of Workstation or Fusion please consider using my referral links. Not only are you getting excellent workstation virtualization products but you are also helping VMware test their referral program while helping me defray my hosting costs.

As always, thank you for reading, commenting, linking to me, and overall making it fun to write on this blog.

So to save a 404 error this is a placeholder. :-) You really want: “…and by l10O359 you mean 1|O0359.”

:-)

I’m not quite sure how I’ll use tagging separately from categories yet, but I’m sure a reason will present itself sometime soon.

[0] I only use four plugins, so this was easy. FeedBurner FeedSmith, Google XML Sitemaps, Popularity Contest, and Share This.

Morons.

In reading that old post I realize I’ve fallen way behind on my project to script the finding and killing of comment spammers. As I said, “not just a quick death, but a long, painful one involving cucumbers, grizzly bears, and sandstone. And not the nice cucumbers, either, but the homegrown ones with all the little spiky things on them.”

I still feel that way, though I may replace the sandstone with sporks.

Their Chicago data center has been completely offline all yesterday, and their ETA for resolution is basically indefinite now. Every hour it moves another hour out. This began yesterday as a mysterious power outage. Right now I suspect won’t be resolved until I go get my server, dispute the credit card charge to get my money back, and find a new colocation facility. This is the worst outage yet, but every couple of months the data center loses power, the network dies, etc. Lame but tolerable, until now. Now it looks like this is a lame way of saying “going out of business.”

Or, maybe I’ll just scrap the idea of having my own server and host somewhere else… Suggestions? I don’t want to spend a ton of money but I have a number of sites that need to be up most of the time. I also want control over the software on the box, so if I want a new version of Apache I can install it myself. Who are people using for colocation or hosted services?

In the “do as I say, not as I do” category I took the opportunity to change my DNS hosting back to GoDaddy’s servers, too[0]. Normally I wouldn’t think of changing something during an outage but since my TTLs were an hour anyhow it seemed to be a good opportunity. I would hate to deprive someone of their Lone Sysadmin news feed. :-)

Thanks all! I haven’t said it recently but thanks for reading, commenting, and generally keeping me on my toes. FeedBurner tells me there are more of you out there now, and I know with sites like sysadminblogs.com and planetsysadmin.com aggregating my feed my readership has gone up a lot. Very cool, and thank you.

…Bob

[0] Why change back? They have more redundancy than I have, plus I’m getting tired of running my own everything when all I need is an A, MX, and TXT record. :-)

$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.2

w00t. Subversion access to these projects is so nice.